I wrote this entry just to make the lame geeky triumvirate of posts complete.
I saw this entry linked from
Planet Debian (an aggregation of a bunch of
Debian developers' blogs):
pure64
It's short, so I'm almost all of it below:
My workstation is now on pure amd64, after a bit of an odd cross-install-via-chroot procedure preserving all my packages and other files (basically: debootstrap into an amd64 chroot, deinstall everything, mv everything over, boot). I still count it as the same installation, though, so it's still technically on the same 1997 installation...
So, the last time he installed his operating system was 1997. Since then, it's just been upgrades. Now, it seems as if this last upgrade kind of stretched the definition of upgrade since it seems like it took more effort than just installing Debian from scratch, but it shows that it can be done. Even switching to a completely new architecture (x86 to amd64), Debian made a successful upgrade possible. Maybe I'll try that for my switch from x86 to my mac PowerPC G4 (just kidding).
I've read that Debian has always tried very hard to make upgrades from one major version to the next painless, but this is pretty incredible.
